You Can Read and Swap Books Over and Over Again

Reading books is one of the best things you can do. Reading allows you to learn new things, use your imagination, and calm you before bed. But if you are an avid reader, you may not have enough room to store all the books you read. And the cost of buying books keeps rising. Now a new buy-back program in the UK could be the perfect solution.

The Bookloop alternative
Bookloop recently launched a buy back project where readers can trade books they have already read for credit or more pre-owned books, according to Positive News. The project is being touted as a sustainable alternative to Amazon. It is part of the Bookshop.org, an online platform for independent booksellers that was launched in 2020.

Bookloop is being run in a partnership with the buy-back book platform Zeercle that operates in the UK, France, Germany, Austria, and Sweden. More than 10,000 books are processed every day.

The system is very user friendly. Customers can scan and upload their books to a valuation system and then drop the books off at a collection site or the books can be picked up from home. The minimum amount of books sold is £5. Site credit is given that can be used for purchasing other books. The returned books are sold by Zeercle through the online marketplace that excludes any Amazon owned or operated sites.

We’re glad to see Bookshop.org set up this scheme, which feels well-thought-through and a great way of repurposing books, and helping sustain bookshops and new book purchases,” Charlie Richards, an independent bookseller, told Positive News.

Authors also benefit from their books being resold. An agreement with the Society of Authors and ALS means that the royalties that are collected from second-hand book sales are shared and distributed through  an author fund.

Supporting independent booksellers
The business model of Bookshop.org is based on independent booksellers setting up bookstores on its website, reported The Guardian. These shops receive the full profit from selling the pre-owned books.

“We’re always saying the best way to support bookshops is in person,” Mark Thornton, senior partnerships manager for the site told The Guardian. “But on the other side of that, the inexorable rise of online book purchases means we have to find new ways of looping all of these things together, so that we’re all in this shared endeavor of supporting a really positive reading culture, with independent bookshops at its heart.”

Only 2 percent of the books that were sold are not purchased. Most of these unsold books are donated to charities and less than 0.5 percent are recycled. That’s because the market for a particular book may be saturated, or no longer popular. But the concept works very well.

“Closing the loop on getting pre-owned books to new readers while benefiting both bookshops and authors feels extremely positive,” Amber Harrison of FOLDE in Dorset told Positive News.  “It’s a really sustainable way of getting books into the hands of more people, without cost being a barrier.”